Desktop and Laptop

PackageKit replaces the previous graphical package management stack on GNOME, Apper is used for package management on KDE

Multimedia support

In Debian wheezy, ffmpeg has been replaced by the libav fork, which is considered to feature a more conservative release process and thus fit better to Debian's needs. It provides all libraries and prepares an upgrade path for existing application packages.

Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!

?FabianGreffrath: I know the paragraph about added codecs is very detailed and technical, but all these codecs are explicitely mentioned on purpose. They are kind of buzz words and Debian was long time infamous for not supporting them, so this should get explicit press coverage. I am not a native speaker so the actual wording is, of course, subject to change.

Server

Dovecot is upgraded from v1.2 to v2.1. This involves moving the previous single dovecot.conf to conf.d-style files. Backup your config before upgrading and read README.Debian.gz.

Distributed Computing

Packages for Condor, CCTools, and DMTCP have been added as an integrated solution for distributed high-throughput computing in local-, cluster-, grid-, or cloud-computing scenarios. This includes support for checkpoint and migration of unmodified executables and interpreter sessions (dmtcp). Various interfaces to use these facilities are provided. For example, makefile-like distributed parallelization (Makeflow), or a minimal ?GridEngine compatibility layer (condor_qsub). Other packages (e.g. NiPype) have been modified to work with this solution out-of-the-box.

Programming

1.9 as default version, 1.8 still available, but will be dropped in Jessie

most of packages for Ruby libraries renamed, with one package ruby-package for all supported Ruby versions instead of libpackage-ruby*

many Debian packages for Ruby libraries are recognized by Rubygems, thanks to metadata shipped by those packages and the rubygems-integration package, making those metadata available for Rubygems. Those packages can be used to satisfy dependencies both with plain Rubygems and with Bundler.

Debian Pure Blends

The Debian subsets targeting at specific user groups which were formerly known as Custom Debian Distributions are now called Debian Pure Blends (in short Blends). New Blends featuring metapackages in Wheezy are : none yet

Debian Med

YaroslavHalchenko: In my opinion it is better to group and describe not by a team/blend per se but by field of endeavor. Individual package names would not make it into release notes anyways, but listing them here might help to quantify on how much coverage of any specific field got improved

Simulations: contains the packages that are used to do simulations in different fields of science: discrete element method, molecular dynamics, traffic simulation.

High energy physics: packages related to development of High Energy Physics applications, which is a branch of physics that studies the elementary subatomic constituents of matter and radiation, and their interactions.

Physics-dev: packages are helpful for development of applications for Physics and Mathematics.

Dataacquisition: build you own SCADA application using the TANGO Control System, its python binding and its Qt based graphical toolkit taurus.

ADD YOUR FIELD

with new software addressing miscelaneous computing demands

Distributed computing

cctools, condor, dmtcp, mpi4py

Remote access: guacamole

General numeric computing

numexpr, pandas, skimage, statsmodels, xppaut (maintained again)

IPython 0.13 with notebook support

Other helpful tools: CDE (cdepack), numdiff

although not an explicit release goal -- many of the above packages enabled exercising of upstream's unittest batteries at build-time -- that greatly improved reliability and guaranteed performance of the scientific software in Debian.

No longer supported in Wheezy

uw-imapd or ipopd daemons: Code is in bad shape and better alternatives exist. In particular dovecot is recommended as replacement, being equally (if not more) compliant with IMAP RFCs and thoroughly tested with transitions from uw-imap.

sudoers: The /etc/sudoers file in sudo has been changed to be a conffile (605130) and must be upgraded to the package version which contains new features. New features include addition of secure_path and #includedir /etc/sudoers.d (639841).

bootlogd: The bootlogd functionality has been split out into a separate package. If you had boot logging previously and want to continue it then install the bootlogd package.

ischroot: The ischroot command is new in debianutils version 4 (627205) introduced during Wheezy Testing. Unfortunately it is buggy and does not detect that it is running in a chroot (685034). Upgrades from Squeeze will not be affected. Upgrades of chroots from Testing will fail. A workaround is to copy /bin/true on top of /usr/bin/ischroot before the upgrade to enable a successful upgrade of a chroot. And copy it again afterward and after every upgrade of debianutils.

php5: Upgrades from squeeze will remove the php5-suhosin package, but leave configuration files in place. This will cause a "PHP Warning" email to be sent to root every half hour. Purge the php5-suhosin package to stop these.

rsyslog: Upgrades from systems that did not already have rsyslog installed may not have any syslog daemon running after the upgrade. After your upgrade, check whether rsyslog is installed, and install it if necessary.

Notes

DSO Linking Changed

Previously the linker used indirect dependent shared libraries to resolve symbols. That would hide various encapsulation violations. Now the linker does not use indirect shared libraries. See ToolChain/DSOLinking for details.

Debian Installer Preseed Changed

The preseed keymap options for the Debian Installer have changed. Previously console-keymaps-at/keymap=us set the keymap for an automated preseed. Now the option is keymap=us and the previous option is ignored.

getty now clears the vt tty screen

In the util-linux package getty has changed and it now clears the screen. This seems like a good thing on the surface. Then you discover that it destroys the boot time messages on vt1 including any errors that are on the screen at the time. To prevent this a new option --noclear has appeared. To restore the previous behavior change the getty line in /etc/inittab to include the --noclear option.